Cinemalaya 2011: BISPERAS Review

Set
on Christmas Day's eve in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, Jeffrey
Jeturian's Bisperas (Eve) details a family's return from the
traditional panunuluyan, a re-enactment
of Joseph and Mary's search for a place to stay involving the members of the
parish, only to discover that their house has been robbed. As they account for
what has been stolen from their belongings, long-kept secrets are uncovered,
revealing the ironic dysfunctions of what seems to be a model middle-class
Filipino family.

The
film is deceptively simple. It faithfully follows the dysfunctional family
trope, with no sharp turns in the narrative, just incidents piling upon
incidents until everything explodes predictably at the dinner table. It is shot
with hardly any pretense for cinematic prettiness or flair, just the drab
interiors of a typical subdivision house, illuminated only by sparse room and
Christmas lights. It is expertly edited, with scenes stitched together in near
seamless fashion, importantly establishing continuity in the story that exists
within a very short period of time.

Bisperas is a superbly acted
film. Tirso Cruz III plays the beleaguered patriarch with controlled ferocity.
Raquel Villavicencio, on the other hand, playing the family's very tolerant
matriarch, blends into the subtle drama with admirable ease, putting in a
mannered performance until the exact moment when hysterics become necessary. As
the couple's grown children, Julia Clarete, Jennifer Sevilla, and Edgar Allan
Guzman give the brood of discordant adults ample chemistry, making the strict
distinction between emotional attachment and distance among them so deliciously
apparent.

It
is as if the film was willfully made to look ordinary and feel familiar, owing
to Jeturian's agenda of having the film mirror the pretentiousness of the
Philippines' bourgeoisie, a class as beholden as any other to the Catholic
Church but displays such attachment to religion with near-absurd pomp. By
bookending the film with public displays of faith and religiosity, where it
appears that the Church has been successful in tending its flock to follow the
ways of Christianity, Jeturian enunciates the ungodly difference between what
is displayed in public and what is kept from public.

Jeturian
sprinkles the film with a little too much of symbolisms and visual cues that
make it a tad more pedantic than what is required to effectively communicate
its message. Uneven only because of certain portions when the film is carried
away by an understandable eagerness to reveal the failures of an overbearing Church
and its shallow flock, Bisperas is a
film that triumphs when it is low key, when its affronts to Catholic hypocrisy
are gestured instead of zealously announced.

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